wine delirium, spectral fog and other strange dances from the stinking shack of Chocolate Monk

Friday, 25 May 2012

Blood Stereo - "The Larval Tuning Fork (& Other Visions)" LP

"Massive new album in an edition of 300 copies from the duo of Karen Constance & Dylan Nyoukis: The Larval Tuning Fork consist of two side-long works judiciously edited and put-together with an easy/impenetrable logic from live shows and performances across the globe. Much of this is on the minimal side as is the contemporary Blood Stereo style, with plundered conversations and small-scale clatter and drone put to the service of long blanks of almost hypnotically monomaniacal accumulations of tape and twonk. The way the whole deal is constructed unfolds with alla the seamless surreal appeal of a reverie or a dream, with extremely subtle vocal sounds see-sawing over a bed of barbed wire while what sounds like a buncha farmyard animals read fairytales to each other. Blood Stereo’s last few releases represent a considerable leap forward for the group in terms of logistics and advanced compositional vision and this is pretty much the apex of their contemporary form." - VT

"heavy tape-collage of live-recorded elements by the constance / nyoukis duo, canvassing their entirely zonked in-situ fibblings across multiple fidelities & locales, peppering the proceedings with “real” observations & “life moments” ...
killer set (easily their most crisp & well-engineered ; removes a great bit of the moss from the audio spectrum, lets us in on the “details”) ; comes in an eye-popping sleeve w/ an insert (detail below) ..." - Mimaroglu

"Remember when you were a kid and you got your first big hunk of bubblegum? ‘Course after the first fif-teen seconds the stuff always tastes like rubber tires. But what kid could care? Nah, you were hoping to get a hugeass bubble going— something with a real sense of distention— that would plaster itself pink all over your hair and your clothes when it finally blew out. Dylan & Karen use tapes & toys & their mouths to bring you creaking doors, aviaries, doddering old ladies, a troupe of muppets grunting & puking their guts out, some old drunk sailor squeezing a harmonium, etc. But what’s important here is the overall bulge & slump as their record breathes, now bigger… now smaller… now bigger… and a little bigger still. Lately they’ve been taking advantage of improved sound quality, but it seems to be in the interest of making things more slippery rather than less so (and if you listen to a lot of records, you know what a fucking blue moon that is). So go ahead & let them get a little bit of their saliva on you. It’s the only way to find out whether they pop one off this time." - Liner Notes, Angela Sawyer